GoKawiilIntroduction
There’s a push right now for whole companies to adopt AI wholesale - dump every bit of context into it, write an AGENTS.md or INSTRUCTIONS.md in every repo so any project is discoverable and contributable by an agent, not just a human. Slightly funny, if you think about it: I’ve never once gotten a human teammate to actually read the README, and now we’re all writing better docs than we ever did, just aimed at a robot instead. The question that comes with it is the obvious one: does this make engineering redundant? Once all the context about a stack and its infrastructure is written down somewhere an agent can read it, are we next?
I don’t think that’s quite the right question, because we’ve already lived through a version of it.
We’ve Been Here Before
Did Kubernetes kill Ansible? Kind of. I haven’t written an Ansible playbook in years - if you handed me one right now I’d be squinting at the module syntax like I’d never seen it before - not because configuration management stopped mattering, but because Kubernetes made server management easy enough that we stopped building our own node images at all - we just use whatever the cloud provider hands us, an AWS AMI built for us, no questions asked. And when did I last SSH into a node to debug something? Mostly never. If a node’s acting up, I kill it and hope the replacement doesn’t have the same problem. The next layer up went the same way: run a container on ECS Fargate, in a Lambda, or on Cloudflare Containers, and I genuinely don’t know or care what node it landed on - but that doesn’t mean nobody’s orchestrating it, it means I still decided that workload should be a container in the first place, what image it runs, what it’s allowed to talk to, how it scales, what happens when it fails. Kubernetes and serverless containers didn’t remove that layer of decisions, they moved the unit of work up from “the machine” to “the workload,” and everything below that layer got quietly automated away.
Nobody would say Kubernetes, or Fargate, or Cloudflare’s container platform, replaced infrastructure engineers. Each one replaced a specific layer of manual work - hand-building images, hand-patching boxes, knowing which node a workload landed on - and the engineers moved up to the layer above it every time. I think AI is doing the same thing again, one layer higher.
What Changed Day to Day
I use Claude daily to generate Helm charts and write Terraform modules. The part it actually removed from my day isn’t the thinking - it’s the lookup work. I don’t read through the AWS provider’s changelog to figure out what changed between v5 and v6 anymore; I describe what I want, in whatever shape I want the module or chart to end up, and Claude produces a version of it. It takes iteration to get it into the shape I’d actually ship, but once it’s there, it becomes the example for next time - especially with an AGENTS.md in the repo pointing at it.
The same thing happened one level down a while ago: I don’t hand-write raw Kubernetes YAML any more than I hand-write Ansible modules - that’s what Helm charts are for. Increasingly, I don’t hand-write the Helm chart either. I direct what it should do, and Claude writes it.
What Hasn’t Changed
... continue reading